After an open letter from employees, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke out about US enforcement separating children from families

Getty Images / Chesnot / Contributor

Big tech is facing a backlash: from its employees. "Those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm," wrote Microsoft employees in a letter to CEO Satya Nadella this week.

The open letter protested the tech firm's work for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which has been forcibly separating children from their families and imprisoning them in conditions that have prompted international condemnation. And US president Donald Trump's recently signed order to end his family separation policy with family detention is unlikely to end human rights abuses.

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"We, tech industry employees, will not help build products that advance violence against families at the border," a spokesperson from worker-led industry activist organisation the Tech Workers Coalition says. "When our employers take on government contracts that advance military interests, we resist. We’ve seen the power unleashed when a few workers standing together grows into thousands of workers resisting."

Protesting the state

On June 18, Microsoft issued a public statement decrying human rights abuses by ICE and saying that the company was "dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border" following public outcry over the company's $19.4 million contract to provide Azure cloud services to the agency.

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Two days later, CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a memo to all employees: "Microsoft is not working with the U.S. government on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border. Our current cloud engagement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is supporting legacy mail, calendar, messaging and document management workloads."

While the statement is splitting hairs to paper over the reality of Microsoft's contractually binding relationship with an organisation that's been described as engaged in "unconscionable" child abuse by the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, the fact that he made the personal statement at all is a testament to the growing power and visibility of workers' movements in the tech industry.

Nadella was responding to Microsoft workers' open letter, first reported by The New York Times, asking "that Microsoft cancel its contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) immediately, including contracts with clients who support ICE. We also call on Microsoft to draft, publicise and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Microsoft nor its contractors will work with clients who violate international human rights law. "

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The workers made clear that Microsoft's profit-at-any-cost attitude to government contracts is not a position shared by the majority of its employees: "As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit. We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognise the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm."

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They're following in the footsteps of Google staff, who successfully pressured their employer into adopting and publishing a set of principles to guide its work on Artificial Intelligence, following public, internal and academic outcry over the company's participation in Project Maven”— a Pentagon-run programme to equip US military drones with computer vision.

That victory came at the cost of a number of principled resignations when it appeared that Google intended to ignore criticism. The resulting guiding principles are on the weak side of the human rights argument, stating that "while we are not developing AI for use in weapons, we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas. These include cybersecurity, training, military recruitment, veterans’ healthcare, and search and rescue." However, the commitment to stay out of AI weapons development is a significant victory for workplace organising.

What should you do when Google gets into bed with the US military?

Educate, agitate, organise

The tech sector has never been a stronghold of the trade union movement, which has been systematically attacked and weakened in the United States for decades. Attempts to organise labour have been made before, notably in the form of the Alliance@IBM union, which formed in 1999 to protest mass redundancies but folded in 2016 under the pressure of job cuts and a corresponding decline in union membership.

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More broadly, workers' movements within the industry have been slow to develop, damped down by companies providing perks and money alongside the message that unions weren't needed. That was compounded by traditional union organisers's conception of tech workers as privileged gentrifiers in collusion with bosses.

But in recent years, people in tech have been using collective action to speak out. Although it's only recently come into the public eye, community organising within companies is thriving, says Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, speaking on her own behalf, rather than as a representative of her employer. "The thing that's new is that workers are publicly speaking. Workers [in tech] have been organising to accomplish product changes in order to hold companies accountable to their mission for many, many years – dating back at least eight years."

She says that the reason we've been hearing more about these workers' protests lately – as in the case of Project Maven and Microsoft's ICE contracts – is because, "when you have governmental interests that are on the other side of an issue, it's a lot harder to accomplish that change within a company because management wind up being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

"If their employers are telling them one thing and the government telling them another thing, with the power to coerce them, to regulate them, to threaten the safety of their employees, that's a really difficult situation. So the only possible counterweight to a government is the court of public opinion." We only get to hear about these staff campaigns when internal pressure has failed, attempts to quietly fix the situation haven't worked, and workers have decided that their only option is to speak to the press.

Attitudes and willingness among tech workers towards taking an ethical stance with their employers have also improved, she says: "Something that I'm glad to see changing is that employees had a sense of apathy: either a sense of 'we can't possibly affect this, we're just going to do our little piece' or 'I don't know what this is being used for and I don't care'. But I think that is changing."

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A beginner's guide to workplace organising

"If they don't already have a movement within their company, people have to build a movement," says Fong-Jones "It's a lot harder for 100 different people at 100 different companies to do something than for a critical mass of people at each individual company."

External organisations can also help. The Tech Workers Coalition has recently supported workers illegally fired from logistics technology firm Lanetix for attempting to unionise and has spoken out on behalf of its members against major companies including Amazon for both labour abuses and broader human rights issues.

The Industrial Workers of the World, an international activist union that began fighting for US labour rights since 1905, has a dedicated chapter for communications, computer and software workers. The union, which works alongside other workers' groups has, like the Tech Workers Coalition, provided support for workers at firms like Amazon and US telecoms giant AT&T.

And for organising internal staff campaigns and petitions Coworker.org provides free online tools to help workers communicate their demands to their employers.

For those looking for an ethical framework to organise around, Liz Fong-Jones suggests that the ACM/IEEE-CS Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice would be a good starting point. However, she points out, some ethical positions are going to vary between individuals: "Every employee needs to make their own decisions about what they're comfortable working on and what they're not comfortable working. In general, it's important for Silicon Valley workers to understand what they're contributing to and for companies to be honest with their workers about what they're working on."

And, in a sector where many workers' skills are both rare and highly specialised, employee action can put a pinch on companies, Fong-Jones says. "People have a right to collectively express their opinions on what they're comfortable working on or not and for that to be a collective influence. If – entirely hypothetically – 20 percent of your employees say that they're not comfortable working with ICE, do you really want to take that contract and have them quit?"

Discussion of labour conditions is protected speech under US law, but tech firms can be sensitive about what their employees share publicly, and particularly with the media. Fong-Jones says that organisers should consider "what are working conditions, what is product related, what are you safe talking about, what are you not safe talking about. Because companies in Silicon Valley do aggressively go after what they perceive to be leaks."

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To date, US tech worker organising has primarily focussed on either working conditions such harassment and the right to organise, or on product issues like Google workers' concerns about the development of AI for military projects. But once workers have begun organising, issues are likely to intersect and the same advocacy techniques can be applied to both areas.

And, Fong-Jones points out, employee welfare and the geopolitical ethics of international corporations aren't as far removed from one another as they might at first appear: "If you have family in Russia or China and it comes out that your company is doing work on behalf of the US military, that seems like an issue where you were misled about what your working conditions were going to be.

"The same power structures and techniques can be used to advocate for product issues [as well as workers' rights]. At Google, we actually started on the product side and then those same organising structures could be used on labour issues. I think that the really interesting thing is where those things intersect and that's where we're going to see a lot of really interesting things in the coming months."